The lost salt gift of blood

by Alistair MacLeod

This collection of 11 stories, set for the most part in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, uses detailed description of the stark, beautiful landscape and the lives of fishermen, farmers, miners, and lighthouse keepers to convey a powerful range of feelings. A Canadian writer not well known in the United States, MacLeod draws on childhood memories and on folktales of Ireland and Scotland, often writing in the first person and using Gaelic quotations to enhance the melancholy moods. A special blending of myth and reality here preserves impressions from a time and place that will never exist again.